Weekend reads: ORI staff revolt?; Excel creates big typos in papers; how to reward reviewers

The week at Retraction Watch featured health care fraud charges for a researcher who committed scientific fraud, and a first-ever government agency lawsuit against a scientific publisher for deceit. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• The leader of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity faces a staff revolt amid criticisms of her direction, reports Jocelyn Kaiser at Science.
• “Excel Created Major Typos in 20 Percent of Scientific Papers on Genes,” reports Laura Wagner in Slate, based on a new paper in Genome Biology.
• Peer review: It’s a thankless task, so how best to reward the scientists who do it? The latest from our co-founders in STAT.
• “Must science be testable?” The ongoing “String Wars” in physics demonstrate why science still needs philosophy, says Massimo Pigliucci. (Aeon)
• “How many papers should I review?” Mario Barbatti gives his answer. (Much Bigger Outside)
• A professor who resigned from the University of Kentucky following sexual harassment allegations also faced accusations of research misconduct — the student newspaper continues to investigate. (Marjorie Kirk, Kentucky Kernel)
• “Mouse microbes may make scientific studies harder to replicate,” reports Kelly Servick. (Science)
• Many of the most important scientific discoveries were unpredictable. How can we make sure those kinds of discoveries continue to be supported? (Jim Woodgett, Medium)
• A journal that was the victim of a spoof several months ago has gone dark. They tell us, however, that it’s just a technical issue.
• Be respectful, be helpful, and be balanced: How to review a paper. (Greg Gibson, The Genome’s Take)
• Determining the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement can be tricky business. (Rick Anderson, Library Journal)
• “I am not shutting up shop. I am changing focus.” Disbelief emerges after a lab fails to get funding for the first time in 40 years because its research is “too basic.” (Elizabeth Payne, Ottawa Citizen)
• Go forth and replicate! says Nature to scientists.
• Scientific Reports is on track to replace PLOS ONE as the largest journal, even though many skeptics believed it would fail. (David Crotty, The Scholarly Kitchen.
• “Change the criteria for measuring performance. In essence, go back in time.” Otherwise, the rate of fundamental innovations in science will continue to slow, say Donald and Stuart Geman (PNAS).
• “In light of our findings the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience.” More trouble in the scholarly literature, courtesy of John Ioannidis and a colleague. (arXiv)
• A Chinese man defrauds authors of millions of yuan with a chain of fake academic journals. (Diao Jiayi, Beijing Today) Maybe the U.S. FTC is watching.
• “Specializing helps scholars in almost all regards, except in terms of visibility.” Erin Leahey muses on interdisciplinary research. (Items, The Social Science Research Council)
• Want to access research funded by NASA? There’s a free way to do that now: PubSpace. (Sean O’Kane, The Verge)
• The president of Mexico, Pena Nieto, plagiarized his thesis, according to media reports. (BBC)
• More U.S. graduate students have won the right to unionize. (Naturejobs)
• Can the “Danish Miracle” in research endure? asks Jan Petter Myklebust. (University World News
• “Mentoring perception, scientific collaboration and research performance: is there a ‘gender gap’ in academic medicine?” (Postgraduate Medical Journal, sub req’d)
• “The assumption that doctorate holders are easily integrated in economic endeavors proves wrong…” (Journal of the Knowledge Economy)
• “New rules to ‘protect’ women researchers abroad are sexist and dangerous,” says an anonymous researcher in The Guardian.
• Those who criticize funding of “absurd” studies are missing the big picture, says Thomas Sigler. (The Australian)
• “[A]n open access citation advantage as high as 19% exists,” according to a new study. (Jim Ottaviani, PLOS ONE)
• “Bias is all around us, but I have seen at first-hand the lengths to which the major journals go to demand rigorous methods, and, therefore, ensure the publication of the truth,” says Ian Harris. “It may be asking too much to expect them to also police the accuracy of the data submitted to them.” (Indian Journal of Medical Ethics)
• “If you remember Alpha Centauri Bb … I just think there’s a concern in the community that every retraction looks bad, even though that one wasn’t officially retracted.” Sara Seager, discussing the newly found Earth-like planet orbiting our nearest star. (Jon Wenz, Discover)
• Cell Press has “introduced exciting new features to bring the methods section the prominence it deserves,” writes Emilie Marcus.
• A judge has thrown out a defamation case against pseudoscience debunker Quackwatch. (Hemant Mehta, Patheos)
• An infusion of financial support for bioRxiv. (press release)
• At a recent major cancer research meeting, more than a third of presentations had conflict of interest disclosure slides “that were displayed at a speed so fast that they exceeded the range of comprehension for most readers.” (JAMA Oncology, sub req’d)
• “[R]andomness plays an important role in the peer review process, and this role cannot be eliminated,” say the authors of a new study. (Science and Engineering Ethics)
• Is reproducibility just another bureaucratic speed bump? asks John Williams. (Inside NIA)
• A new study of physicists finds that “scientists perceive many scenarios as ethically gray, rather than black and white.” (Science and Engineering Ethics)
• There is “an inherent bias in bibliometric measures against novel research,” say the authors of a new preprint. (LSE Impact Blog)
• “Sometimes working in academia feels like being a gymnast at the Olympics,” writes Ulrike Trager. “Not because we’re tumbling through the lab in glittering costumes, but because of the constant pressure to succeed.” (PLOS Blogs)
• A student in Sweden has been sanctioned for plagiarism. (Debora Weber-Wulff, Copy, Shake, and Paste)
• In India, “self-promoting cartels, together with biased evaluation methods and weak penal systems, combine to perpetuate scientific misconduct,” writes Pratap Patnaik. (Science and Engineering Ethics)

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